Posted on 04/07/2012 4:24:15 PM PDT by cartan
Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.
According to many liberals, ALL conservatives are racist (even the black conservatives) and some believe that ALL white people are naturally racist. They’re doubling down now saying the posters on this thread who disagree with the firing are proof that FR is racist. No evidence of actual racism required. It’s a vicious never ending cycle. Screw ‘em.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think FR etiquette is to ping people if we're talking about them.
If I wanted to “get someone in trouble” I would have hit the “abuse” button. Didn't do that; don't plan to do that.
What I wanted was a decision by Jim Robinson. He's made his decision. His call.
That ends the issue of whether Free Republic ought to officially respond to the Atlantic's claim that “Derbyshire doesn't do the really obvious racist stuff — the stuff that goes up at FreeRepublic.com, for example — like post photos Obama in stereotypical tribal garb with a bone through his nose.”
I won't hide the fact that I'd like to expose that as a liberal lie — several other Freepers have said it didn't happen — but as far as I'm concerned, the issue of an official response has been over since this morning.
In any case, what Sherman Logan is writing now is a lot more interesting and I'd like to hear more of what he has to say.
Thanks very much, Jim. You’re right, racism is the liberal agenda and facts don’t matter. No matter the number of Thomas Sowell’s, Lloyd Marcus’s, Clarence Thomas’s, they will always be called tokens by the other racist side, while the rest of us born white, are born racists, especially those born in the South. Of course, a nice Ivy League or Bezerkley education can cure racism, as can idiot white guilt learned in government schools.
I leave it to God to forgive the racists, like Sharpton and Jackson, because I think they know precisely what they’re doing.
Long live Free Republic! FReepers are the absolute.
There was no decision to make. Our policy is, always has been and always will be no racism. To hell with the racist left and the hand-wringing, weak-kneed, girly-men surrender monkey moderates and RINOS (and that includes the NR)!! Rebellion is ON!! Get in or get OUT!!
Most Freepers would be upset with much of what the old curmudgeon Fred Reed writes, but I think you will find this particular piece of interest:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Screwed.shtml
We're definitely on the same page on the culture war, Jim... Tactics may differ, but the goal is the same. And on your website, you set the rules.
America is well down the road to chaos and if we don't do something very quickly, America will be unrecognizable in the near future.
I don't see the prevailing political sentiments of the West changing in the next century.
I just see that our technology infrastructure will finally catch up to the financial demands of the voting majority.
Good point about billions of people with too much leisure time.
Maybe we can pretend they are all college humanities professors on sabbatical?
That would preserve their self-esteem at any rate.
Re: Picking nits
I originally wrote 1000X, then thought, “No, we lose the first decade because it takes ten years to double.”
I have rechecked my math - which means, in my case, that I have counted all the doublings on my fingers.
You are correct.
What I'm about to write would get me banned from a fair number of liberal websites for "racism." It's not racist at all, but it may well be an indictment of how far our culture has already fallen.
One thing I've found over the years is that comments by Koreans about the decline of the West track very closely with my views. I got used long ago to people saying some version of “He's okay, he's American but he's not immoral like too many American guys.” At times I felt like I was being evaluated like an educated black schoolteacher by white guys in 1920s Alabama, who decided I'm okay and “not like those other people of his race.”
Most of the time, what Koreans say (at least to my face) is to discuss the role of the Reformation, of the Protestant work ethic, and (more broadly) the role of Christianity in taking a highly developed Greco-Roman pagan civilization and turning it into a culture that valued the individual, not merely the citizen class to the exclusion of the vast majority of the enslaved population. They then apply that history to their own experience of large-scale conversion of Koreans in a pre-existing Korean culture that was highly civilized but pagan, and had thousands of years of cultural development before contact with the West.
What surprised me, when talking to highly educated multilingual Koreans with doctoral degrees, was to hear raw ethnic pride combined with great appreciation for the history of Western civilization and tremendous disrespect toward modern American cultural wickedness. Almost universally when people are candid, I hear Asian Christians (not just Koreans) commenting on the descent of the West into barbarism, with many saying that America and Europe are taking jackhammers to their own cultures which took hundreds or thousands of years to develop.
I'm not very optimistic about the future of Western civilization. On the other hand, the Bible requires me to be optimistic about the future of the church. What's happening in America is far from the first time that an entire society has rejected its Christian roots.
We're already to the point that there are more Presbyterians in Korea, most of whom are strongly evangelical, than the total number of liberal and evangelical Presbyterian and Reformed Christians in North America, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands — the major centers of Calvinist Christianity until the middle of the last century. Westminster Theological Seminary's campuses in the United States are filled with Korean students, and Chongshin Theological Seminary in Seoul long since surpassed any Calvinist seminary in the United States in terms of the number of students it trains. South Korea now sends the second largest number of foreign missionaries of any country other than the United States. I can point to long lists of problems in the Korean church, but clearly, something is working there that isn't working here.
By contrast, as someone who has lived in the inner city and attended an inner-city church, I can say without reservation that many things about our inner cities are not just falling apart but in an advanced stage of collapse.
The black church as a whole, with some important exceptions, bears a very significant share of the blame for failing to teach moral values, hard work, and the value of education (i.e., how you live your life after you're saved, not just what you need to do to come to Christ). Unlike a lot of whites, I have the credibility to say that, having actually lived and worshiped in that environment, and a fair number of black pastors I know wring their hands over the way white churches are adopting a model of entertainment and emotion rather than teaching and discipleship. In other words, white churches are all too often adopting the same bad approaches to church life that have borne bitter fruit in too many black churches.
My understanding is that Derbyshire is an atheist. If that is correct, then obviously he won't agree with me on the role of the church in society, but I strongly suspect that with a Chinese wife, he agrees with me on the relative strengths of Asian culture versus modern Western culture.
I don't happen to think those differences have very much to do with race. I think they have a great deal to do with the way churches (or other moral authorities) teach fathers and mothers how to raise their families, and the way that schools either reinforce or damage the role of parental teaching in the home.
But no matter what the cause of the collapse of the American family, something has to be done or in the very near future America won't remotely resemble the society which we have inherited.
I personally found the article to be racist. I felt as though the article lumped all black people together (with the exception of what the author referred to as “intelligent and well socialized” black people which he referred to as a slim group). I think it’s terrible to stereotype an entire group of people like that, and I got a feeling of superiority from the author of the piece. I truly believe that all people are made in the image of God and should be judged individually on their characters, not the color of their skin.
There are two kinds of atheists: (1) the type that sees atheism almost as an alternate religion, and evangelizes about it endlessly while expressing extreme hostility to other religions and (2) the type that figures that if god/gods don't exist, it really doesn't much matter what anyone believes, as long as it fosters important civic virtues. And there's nothing like the prospect of eternal hellfire (or the draconian afterlife tortures common to other religions) to motivate believers to stay on the straight and narrow. Although he is an atheist, Derbyshire identifies with the Anglican faith as a matter of tribal affiliation, much as Ulstermen who might never attend church except for weddings and funerals identify with various Protestant denominations, in opposition to their Catholic counterparts who pledge fealty to what Protestants (only in moments of mischief) have called the Purple Whore of Rome.
I wouldn’t argue about a trend. But I find the Bear analogy useful, for another reason. A Bear is a known predator. That would be equivalent to arguing that you would avoid going down a block that is marked with gang symbols, something I would completely agree with.
The problem is that blacks, as a race, are not predators. And we would like to ostracize those that are, and encourage those that are not, and in general push society toward a tolerance and peaceableness that would make all of our lives better.
Stereotypes that suggest the “standard practice” should be to avoid a race because of the actions of a few do not help bring society to where we all want it to be. It instead reinforces the bad behavior we want to discourage. It is similar to accepting 8+% unemployment as the “new normal”. I don’t want to accept that random street riots are normal.
I don’t believe there is something inherent in a particular race that causes them to join packs and brutally attack other races without cause or provocation. I want to believe this is an aberration, caused by environment, specifically the racist environment of the liberals who encourage black 2nd-classness and send the message that we cannot expect better of minorities.
I was watching a Quantum Leap last night, about the south in the 60s. The young up-and-coming black was going to be lynched, and Sam Beckett tried to stop it by encouraging the blacks to just not go protest for their rights, because the KKK was waiting for them and would hang people.
The blacks agreed — but that was giving in to the fear and status quo; in fact, the blacks had to stand up for their rights, and that did lead to them being killed, but also to an advancement in race relations that was thwarted by liberals but was a good start.
What if thousands of whites walked through that DC neighborhood? A few might be killed, but if more were killed, people would take notice, and it would upset people, the police would have to act, and in time the streets would be safe for whites. I hate the idea that we have given up our freedom for security.
Bottom line is that Derbyshire believes that Christianity is a good thing generally, and definitely a benefit to the West. I’m an atheist in the Derbyshire mold, which is why, like him, I support Santorum, the most openly-religious candidate in the GOP field. He’s a nag, but there’s nothing wrong with being one, given the tendency of modern churches towards cargo cult Christianity (prosperity gospel and mid-level marketing like heresies). In a world where the traditional virtues are being given short shrift, someone needs to make the case that libertinism and the shucking of personal responsibility are a dead end rather than the way forward.
Traditionally, racism has meant persecuting people of a given race. In this respect, both Jim Crow and affirmative action constitute racism - Jim Crow persecuted blacks and affirmative action persecutes races and ethnicities outside of the protected groups.
Leftists have extended the "penumbra" of the word (to borrow a word from the Roe v. Wade ruling) to cover noticing group differences between the races. It is now racist to notice that blacks are superior basketball players or that Jews tend to dominate the legal and medical professions. When Derbyshire called himself a racist (in ironic terms), this is what he meant - commonplace day-to-day observations have now been marked verboten by the race hustlers, who have spent the past 50 years promoting what he calls anarcho-tyranny - oppressing the virtuous (of all races) while promoting anarchy by coddling the criminals (of all races) among us. And a big part of the reason that the coddling of criminals was able to reach such an advanced stage was the repeated use of the race card. Self-promoting politicians and think-tankers of all races repeatedly reached for the race card - a bottomless well, given the disproportionate number of blacks who offend and are arrested - and in making it harder to incarcerate career criminals, have made both blacks and non-blacks alike less safe.
Don't believe that the 50's (and even the 60's) were much safer? If San Diego PD's stats are to be believed, per capita violent crime was much lower 50 years ago; better emergency medical care has turned many shooting and stabbing incidents that would have become murder cases back in the 1950's into aggravated assault cases today. In 2006, per capita robberies were 6x what they were in 1950. Per capita aggravated assaults (shootings, stabbings) were 15x.
Stereotypes that suggest the “standard practice” should be to avoid a race because of the actions of a few do not help bring society to where we all want it to be. It instead reinforces the bad behavior we want to discourage. It is similar to accepting 8+% unemployment as the “new normal”. I don’t want to accept that random street riots are normal.That is a good point; however, simply acting as if unpleasant facts do not exist may or may not be the solution, depending on context. When you are dealing with an individual, your knowledge of statistical differences between (possibly racial) groups is not very helpful, since you never know on which part of the bell curve a given individual is located. And even if you do, you still don’t know his place on the bell curve of any other variable. An individuum cannot be characterized by any single variable, after all, whether they correlate or not.
However, when you are dealing with groups that are large enough, there may be some reason to believe that the law of large numbers is about to set in, and you may get somewhat accurate estimates of the properties of the group by applying your statistical knowledge about such groups. You might still get wrong results, of course. By mere chance, for example, especially if the group is still rather small. Or if the group is not a sufficiently random selection. But should you still throw away all your statistical knowledge and pretend ignorance, just because you do not like the idea of interacting with people differently just because of simple traits like the color of their skin? What if your statistical information predicts that the group of people surrounding you is going to be dangerous?
I don’t believe there is something inherent in a particular race that causes them to join packs and brutally attack other races without cause or provocation. I want to believe this is an aberration, caused by environment, specifically the racist environment of the liberals who encourage black 2nd-classness and send the message that we cannot expect better of minorities.I don’t think Derb claims otherwise. Group differences may be inheritable or not, and if they are inheritable, they are usually only inheritable to some degree or other. But if group differences are currently there, they are there—no matter what caused them, or whether they are inheritable or not. If you act accordingly, you are doing so based on the state of the world in which it currently happens to be. So, if you get lost and find yourself in a purely black neighborhood, you may choose to ignore your knowledge that statistically, such neighborhoods tend to be more dangerous than others. Now, look around; what if everybody around you is also a young male, wearing a hoodie? Would you now begin to raise your level of concern? What if they are having gold teeth? They are wearing baggy pants? Ghetto blasters are spouting gangsta rap? And every other happens to be packing an Uzi? If you now begin to feel a little uneasy, you are still acting on statistical knowledge about certain groups of people, in a possibly unfair way! So, whistle Don’t Worry be Happy and stroll on? :-)
Thanks for posting Fred Reed’s column and site. He was a great street reporter for the Washington Times and is greatly missed considering the leftist BS that came from Adrienne Washington (a black writer who filled his column slot). The Wash. Post writers with an ocassional exception who did what Reed did, i.e. cover the streets, are leftist cry-babies and often down-right stupid.
Please read Fred Reed’s column that Pining_4_TX posted:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Screwed.shtml
1. Blacks, *as a race*, are not predators. Men like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Allen West, Bill Cosby, et al, certainly aren’t predators, never have been, never will be. Their skin color is no indication of a violent nature whatsoever.
2. Urban American Blacks, as a large statistical cohort, produce, support, shelter and defend feral young black urban males, many of whom *are* predators. Known predators.
Want to argue the point? Then go walking through known urban black gang territory.
Now, while there’s an obvious mathematical and logical distinction here, it is lost on the non-black, and especially non-urban-black population of the US. What do they see on/in the news? Case after case of young black urban males engaged in Clockwork Orange levels of violence, and in majority against their own people. And in case after case, the black community tolerates it. They might not *like* it, but they tolerate it, because they resist real efforts to change it, starting with resisting efforts to come down like a hammer upon those who commit capital crimes.
When we see situations where a black male has attempted to perpetrate violence against someone outside their racial cohort, and they’ve been killed by their intended victim(s), we see all manner of wailing about how “he didn’t deserve that,” as we’re seeing here. We can see it about every two weeks somewhere around the country now.
What do I mean when I say “Clockwork Orange” levels of violence? Here’s an example of Clockwork Orange violence:
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/03/31/2-dead-12-hurt-in-mass-shooting-in-north-miami/
Shooting a five year old girl? WTF?
OK, so that’s black-on-black Clockwork stuff. Let’s seriously up the volume a tad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom
NB that the four judged guilty of those murders will get new trials, thanks to the judge in their cases being disbarred.
You might want to believe that these events are an aberration, and 40 years ago, you might have been correct in that assumption. But, starting the in late 80’s, the level of violence in urban black neighborhoods ramped up rather dramatically. In the last 10 years, and especially in the last four, it appears that a situation that previously appeared as bad as it could get has gotten worse, as black urban females start engaging in senseless violence as well:
http://www.silive.com/northshore/index.ssf/2011/12/9_arrests_in_staten_island_inc.html
Now, there is a cultural bias against dealing with this behavior within the urban black community. Look at what blacks call other blacks who are conservatives (and almost invariably successful as well). It isn’t pretty. The “keepin’ it real” and “Stop Snitching!” ideals of the urban black culture aren’t doing anyone any favors, yet that seems to be the prevailing culture now. Bill Cosby, to his eternal credit, has been on this issue for 10+ years now, in no uncertain or equivocal terms. His reward for his bravery to speak the truth? A ration of crap from many blacks, saying that he’s “making blacks look bad in front of whites.”
Huh? As tho the evening news weren’t already doing that?
re: What if thousands of whites marched through a DC neighborhood? I don’t know. But I do know what residents say when non-blacks move into their neighborhoods in DC:
Sooner or later, people are going to have to look at this situation and see that it is unique. There aren’t parallels in other racial groups in the US. Something has gone way, way wrong in urban black culture, and they’re actively resisting attempts, both from within and without their communities, to change what’s wrong. That’s also unique.
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